(Harvard Professor John Stilgoe gave this eulogy for the late Eleanor Norris of Norwell at Norris' memorial service on Jan. 12, 2013 at First Parish Church United in Norwell.)

"Indomitable courage filled the heart of Eleanor Norris.

"I remember so much about the woman who materialized behind my best friend, the late Harry Merritt, when we were both eleven and exploring her woods: she welcomed us and asked what we had seen. Through junior and senior high school she involved us in experiences: once she tried to teach us to waltz on skates, humming the music while skating backwards. In those years old planks covered the stringers of the mill-pond bridge, and not one was nailed down: the first time she drove us over them she hit the accelerator, explaining that if one plank broke the car would be beyond it.

"Harry drowned in 1967 and I came to know her differently, glimpsing fragments of widowhood. I helped her maintain what I still call in my heart “Mrs. Norris’s Woods,” for example, trying to find and evict all the snapping turtles in the pond behind her house in order to spare the lives of her beloved ducks and ducklings.

"One rain-swept evening in 1969, she telephoned to ask that I help her with something: three days into a northeast storm, rising water in the millpond threatened the dam. She had been trying without success to remove one of the sluice boards. I tried, lying on my stomach, she sitting on my legs, and only after we used one of the bridge planks as a lever did we force up the first, releasing a thundering torrent.

"Cold, wet, and exhausted, we struggled for a long time with the second, and finally my parents, suspecting something associated with foul weather, drove down the cart path: the headlights of my father’s car revealed the two of us, hanging from the bridge. With their help we raised the second board, the dam stopped trembling, and Eleanor assured them that we knew how to keep our heads when in danger.

"Slowly I realized how much she missed her late husband and how strongly she faced life without him: she refused to be sad and she walked in her woods to be close to the man for whom she named the reservation.

"Years later she asked that I accompany her on behalf of an ill friend to meet some very bad people. She wanted a witness. She confronted them and despite their vicious threats and screaming told them calmly what their future held. On the way home she said quietly that she needed specialists. Several days later she retained two retired state troopers as private detectives. The future she foretold came to pass.

"Over decades, my not asking her personal questions somehow elicited all sorts of stories ranging from running her father’s speedboat to being a Vassar girl in the Roaring Twenties. Eventually I realized how often in them she said she “had to try hard.” I learned how hard it was for her as a teacher to tell her principal that if some so-called old-fashioned ways work well for all students, abandoning them for novel but untested methods might cause real harm.

Page 2 of 2 - "I learned what it was like to have wanted children and not been able to have them, how difficult it was to face down the developers who wanted her land, what it was like for her to outlive her contemporaries. And I learned, because she told me over and over again, to keep on learning no matter how old and how tired one becomes and no matter how hard the lesson . . . and to never surrender to despair.

"In our final conversation, when I told her I thought I might live out the rest of my life as a bachelor, she smiled and told me to have courage, that the perfect girlfriend was around the turn in the path. I asked her which path . . . and we laughed.

"Who was Eleanor Norris? A lady, yes, but more than a lady. She might have been, and in my mind will be always, the gray- or white-lady in the folklore of England and Wales, the brave noblewoman who finds the weak and the lost, typically in winter, in woods, who explains that the woods give strength to those who have courage to see what the trees know."